Scott Harrison's nonprofit stopped telling its own story and started letting donors tell theirs. They built Dollars to Projects, showing exactly where each donation goes on a map, and equipped drilling rigs with GPS and Twitter accounts so supporters could follow their progress in real time.
Chapters
—when we realized that what had started out as our story, and this was such a big revelation for the organization, it was not our story anymore. It didn't belong to us. It was their story. And then we actually needed to be intentional about taking a back seat, getting out of the way, and focusing on the platform, on allowing people to tell their story, and then celebrating them. And that through that, maybe this thing could just continue to grow and scale. We focused on connecting them, showing them their impact, trying to use technology to do that, creating products like Dollars to Projects where when Maggie's money was sent to the field, she got an accounting for all $5,709. She saw that the first $4,596 went to the village of Mayu-El-El. She could see her name on a sign or on a plaque just to make it real. She could see where it was in Google Maps. And then every single donor got a report. Even if they gave $1, they could see exactly where the dollar went. Total transparency throughout the process. We started crowdsourcing drilling rigs. And we're like, well, how do we connect the tens of thousands of people that are giving to the rigs? They're going to be drilling wells for 15 years. So we mounted GPS units on these things. We built web trackers and we gave them Twitter accounts so they tweet every time they drill their location so people can follow our rigs as they're going around giving communities clean water.
